On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 19:05:27 +0200, Ceriel Nosforit wrote:

On Sun, 11 Mar 2007 15:31:19 -0700, Roy Lewallen wrote:

Most handheld receivers are designed to be used with a very short duckie
antenna. The front end is totally overwhelmed if connected to an antenna
of reasonable size. Besides having a whole lot of extra gain to
accommodate the short antenna, compromises have to be made in the front
end filtering because of the unit's small physical size. Keeping the
power consumption low further limits the dynamic range of the stages.

I have an Icom R1 and it's full of crossmod birdies even with its own
antenna. When connected to a real antenna, it's totally unusable, the
front end being overloaded and blocked by just about anything. I have to
use a 20 or more dB pad if I ever connect it to a decent antenna. I'll
bet a substantial attenuation pad would do wonders for yours.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Hm. I _thought_ it looked kinda funny having such a puny receiver for such
a long antenna...

Thanks for the tip on the attenuator. I'll look into that. =)

An update, for the sake of archiving if nothing else; I made a high-pass
filter of nothing but a varicap at its lowest capacitance and now the 80
meter band is a joy listening to. I decided to try this since I noticed
that signals were much more powerful at lower frequencies, and suspected
that getting rid of those would improve my reception.

I did try various types of attenuation, but I wasn't quite happy with the
result. The high-pass filter is better. I'm going to make a low-pass
as well to put in series to see if I can improve reception further, and
look into better high-pass filters.

--
Nos